Paul Sutton explains in his Daily Sceptic article There’s Nothing “Scientific” About Climate Models.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

On Sunday’s BBC Politics, Luke Johnson asked for evidence that the recent Dubai flooding was due to climate change. Chris Packham glibly responded: “It comes from something called science.”

This simply highlighted his poor scientific understanding. The issue is his and others’ confusion over what scientific modelling is and what it can do. This applies to any area of science dealing with systems above a single atom – everything, in practice.

My own doctoral research was on the infrared absorption and fragmentation of gaseous molecules using lasers. The aim was to quantify how the processes depended on the laser’s physical properties.

I then modelled my results. This was to see if theory correctly predicted how my measurements changed as one varied the laser pulse. Computed values were compared under different conditions with those observed.

The point is that the underlying theory is being tested
against the variations it predicts.

This applies – on steroids – to climate modelling, where the atmospheric systems are vastly more complex. All the climate models assume agreement at some initial point and then let the model show future projections. Most importantly, for the projected temperature variations, the track record of the models in predicting actual temperature observations is very dubious, as Professor Nicola Scafetta’s chart below shows.

For the climate sensitivity – the amount of global surface warming that will occur in response to a doubling of atmospheric CO2 concentrations over pre-industrial levels – there’s an enormous range of projected temperature increases, from 1.5° to 4.5°C. Put simply, that fits everything – and so tells us almost nothing about the underlying theories.

That’s a worrying problem. If the models can’t be shown to predict the variations, then what can we say about the underlying theory of manmade climate change? But the public are given the erroneous impression that the ‘settled science’ confirms that theory – and is forecasting disastrously higher temperatures.

Such a serious failing has forced the catastrophe modellers to (quietly) switch tack into ‘attribution modelling’. This involves picking some specific emotive disaster – say the recent flooding in Dubai – then finding some model scenario which reproduces it. You then say: “Climate change modelling predicted this event, which shows the underlying theory is correct.”

What’s not explained is how many other scenarios didn’t fit this specific event. It’s as if, in my research, I simply picked one observation and scanned through my modelling to find a fit. Then said: “Job done, the theory works.” It’s scientifically meaningless. What’s happening is the opposite of a prediction.

It’s working backwards from an event and showing
that it can happen under some scenario.

My points on the modelling of variations also apply to the work done by Neil Ferguson at Imperial College on catastrophic Covid fatalities. The public were hoodwinked into thinking ‘the Science’ was predicting it. Not coincidentally, Ferguson isn’t a medical doctor but a mathematician and theoretical physicist with a track record of presenting demented predictions to interested parties.

I’m no fan of credentialism. But when Packham tries it, maybe he needs questioning on his own qualifications – a basic degree in a non-physical ‘soft’ science then an abandoned doctorate.

Footnote: INMCM–One Low Sensitivity Model Does Replicate Past Temperatures

Climate Models: Good, Bad and Ugly

Background Post on Attributing Exteme Weather Events to Climate Change

Climate Loss and Damage Fails Again

 

 

Randall G. Holcombe writes at Independent Institute President Biden’s Climate Aspirations.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.  H/T John Ray

Most of what the political class calls policies are
really aspirations with no policy content.

They are feel-good statements that promote goals most people would support, with no associated policies that would move toward those goals. The following is an example.

The White House’s web page for the National Climate Task Force (skip down to the section “President Biden’s Actions to Tackle the Climate Crisis”) lists emissions goals for 2030, 2035, and 2050, well after President Biden will have left office, even if he serves out a second term. These are aspirations and aspirations that would have to be met by his successors, letting the president off the accountability hook.

What prompted me to write about this subject was this article titled “Biden’s scaled-back power rule raises doubts over US climate target,” which reports on an actual policy. The Biden administration has decided to exclude natural gas power plants from upcoming emissions standards.   The key point in this example is that the president’s actual policy works against the president’s stated goals.

Further down, the website lists the Biden administration’s accomplishments toward fulfilling his climate aspirations. They include a record number of electric vehicles and charging stations, new solar and wind projects, and supporting domestic manufacturing of clean energy technologies.

Those may be good things, but they are
things the private sector is doing.

“Support” isn’t a policy; it’s an attempt to take political credit for private sector action. If these things count as accomplishments, they are private sector accomplishments, not Biden administration accomplishments.

The website also credits the Biden administration for finalizing the strongest vehicle emissions standards in American history and proposing more robust standards for greenhouse gas and air pollution emissions. Those are not policies; they are aspirations. Should those aspirations be realized, it will be because the private sector has figured out how to reduce its emissions.

As the political season ramps up this year, notice that the “policies”
that politicians will propose are not really policies at all; they are aspirations.

They say, “Here are some good things I would like to accomplish if I am elected,” but they don’t say how they intend to accomplish them. They amount to feel-good slogans rather than actual public policies.

Most people will be in favor of mitigating climate change,
reducing crime, securing the border, and reducing the budget deficit.

Those are feel-good aspirations. Fewer people will favor specific policies aimed at realizing those aspirations. That’s why politicians talk about aspirations rather than specific policies. That’s also why those aspirations often fail to be realized.

The aspirations are popular; the policies to accomplish them are less so.
That’s why the Biden administration is enacting a policy
that works against his own stated goals.

Footnote:  Climate and Energy Policies No Relation to Climate Mitigation

When it comes to controlling weather and climate, it’s actually worse than the author says.  What policies there are serve only to destroy society’s energy platform with no discernable impact on the supposed problem.

Climatists Mistake Means for Ends

 

J. Scott Turner explains how the roots of environmental stewardship were poisoned, resulting in the perverted modern decarbonization movement.  His Spectator Australia article is Environmentalism: from concern about clean air to throwing soup at the Mona Lisa.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.  H/T John Ray

Garrett Hardin was a professor of biology and environmental studies at UC Santa Barbara. His “commons” was a metaphor drawn from the traditional English practice of shared grazing and agricultural land to which all members of a community had access. Commons were inherently prone to abuse, Hardin argued, because every user of the commons will exploit it to maximize personal benefit without regard to the other users, leading ultimately to the collapse of the commons as a useful resource.

Hardin extended the metaphor of the commons to include all natural resources, including the air, water, other species, even the entire Earth. The tragedy of Hardin’s expansive commons was the inexorable march to environmental doom, driven by the folly of human freedom. “No technical solution” could halt its march, no ingenious tinkering could fix the problem. Rather, Hardin asserted that the juggernaut could only be arrested through “mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon.” To save ourselves, we would have to give up many freedoms we take for granted, specifically “relinquishing the freedom to breed.”

Hardin’s “Tragedy of the Commons” is perhaps the most influential paper
ever to come out of the field of ecology.

Within its six pages were sown the seeds that have grown into the vast industry that is modern environmentalism. If you’ve ever wondered how environmentalism got from simple concern for clean air and water and preservation of wilderness and its wonderful creatures, to Greta Thunberg, Extinction Rebellion and throwing soup at the Mona Lisa, it was Garrett Hardin who drew the map.

Hardin’s path to the tragedy of the commons was itself mapped out by the English economist and cleric, Thomas Malthus. When Thomas Carlyle famously cast economics as the “dismal science” — a “dreary, desolate… quite abject and distressing science” — it was Thomas Malthus he had in mind. Malthus’s economic philosophy was one of finitude and futility. Human populations always grew faster than could the food supply, he asserted, leading inexorably to famine, disease, perpetual poverty and war: the “Malthusian catastrophe.” Malthus’s economics stands in marked contrast to that of his near-contemporary Adam Smith’s more hopeful economics of free trade, free markets and the inscrutable “invisible hand” that would guide societies to prosperity and liberty. The history of economics has been a long contention between these two competing ideas.

Malthusian economics considered people to be aimless particles pushed this way and that by powerful and indifferent forces. People are considered to have no agency whatsoever, or whatever agency they might have, encompass no other sentiment but selfishness. The only way out of the Malthusian catastrophe would be restraint of human nature, through “mutual coercion mutually agreed upon,” as Garrett Hardin put it. Tyranny

A big part of Malthus’s appeal at the time was his mathematical argument, which imparted a faux certainty to his claims. Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace both were inspired by Malthus’s mathematics, for example, however, Malthus’s mathematics were simplistic and naïve and failed to account for the fact that humans do, in fact, have individual agency — and that the range of moral sentiments was far wider than mere selfishness.

Nevertheless, Malthusianism continues to find devoted acolytes wherever simplistic and naive mathematical presumptions reign. Presently, it is climate change that fits that bill, and it is climate change where the Malthusian tragedy of the commons is again rearing its head — no, having its head propped up, Weekend at Bernie’s style — by a group of twenty-three scholars (they always seem to come in packs) in the prestigious pages of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. There, they call for a “new paradigm” (that buzzword) to stave off the tragedy of the Anthropocene “planetary commons.”

Their new paradigm goes beyond mere governments managing common resources, like sea-floor mineral prospecting. Rather, they are advocating a more ambitious program to take control of the “biophysical systems” that impart resiliency to the Earth’s function. These systems include the atmosphere, hydrosphere (oceans, lakes, rivers and aquifers), the biosphere (encompassing all of the Earth’s biota), the lithosphere (all terrestrial ecosystems, and the cryosphere — ice and snow). Exerting such control, they say, will require “mobilization of efforts at an unprecedented scale, including future research” (read spending), which can only be done through a “nested Earth system governance approach.” This will mean “[adjusting] notions of state sovereignty and self-determination,” taking on “obligations and reciprocal support and compensation schemes … comprehensive stewardship obligations and mandates,” all with the aim to protect “Earth-regulating systems in a just and inclusive way.” You get the idea: “following the science” means a world government that subordinates those pesky notions of self-government and national sovereignty.

Doomsday scenarios are nothing new in the genre of “climate action.” Usually, such contributions bristle with weasel words such as “may,” “possibly,” “perhaps” and the ilk (e.g. the impending extinction of insects). Not so the planetary commons paper, which bristles with alarmist certitude. We are driving the Earth toward dangerous instability, rapidly pushing us past “tipping points” where the Earth will be plummeted irreversibly into disaster, making the Earth inhospitable to life itself. We are sinners in the hands of an angry goddess.

The whole thing is a house of cards, which a little digging will expose. Let’s begin with that word in the title: “Anthropocene.” What does it mean? It sounds science-y, but in fact “Anthropocene” is a neologism proposed in 2000 that demarcates the past 250 years from the Holocene, the geological epoch that began around 11,000 years ago, and which encompasses the rise of modern humans. It is no accident that the Holocene-Anthropocene boundary is set at 250 years before the present: it coincides with the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.

The Anthropocene is the stand-in for the eschatological End Times.
Like the End-Times, it is defined by a basket of horrors and portents:

♦  An order-of-magnitude increase in erosion and sediment transport associated with urbanization and agriculture;
♦  marked and abrupt anthropogenic perturbations of the cycles of elements such as carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus and various metals together with new chemical compounds;
♦  environmental changes generated by these perturbations, including global warming, sea-level rise, ocean acidification and spreading oceanic “dead zones”;
♦  rapid changes in the biosphere both on land and in the sea, as a result of habitat loss, predation, explosion of domestic animal populations and species invasions; and
♦  the proliferation and global dispersion of many new “minerals” and “rocks” including concrete, fly ash and plastics, and the myriad “technofossils” produced from these and other materials.

No mention is made, of course, of the dramatic reductions of poverty, extensions of life spans, improved agricultural productivity, cleaner air and water, safer environments that also mark the Industrial Revolution. Those are Hardin’s “technical solutions,” to be dismissed as the false consciousness that merely delays the springing of the Malthusian trap. We best be wary.

The Anthropocene is not a scientific term: it is an entirely political construction. Being able to sell it as scientific has long been a coveted tool to advance the climate change agenda. This has meant a long march through the institutions that govern geological nomenclature. That effort came to fruition in 2019, at a meeting of the International Union of Geological Sciences in Cape Town, where a vote was taken to formally recognize the Anthropocene as a geological epoch. It passed by a supermajority of 88 percent in favor, which by the rules of the Society, closed off the matter from further debate. What was the actual vote? Thirty-three individuals voted to recognize the Anthropocene, and four dissented. Was this scientific consensus? Technically it was, but we keep in mind the deceptive power of percentages: the 2022 membership of the Geological Society of America totaled 18,096. Remember these figures the next time we hear about a scientific “consensus.”

With the Anthropocene established as a formal geological epoch, the door was opened for climate activists to advance a political agenda masquerading as “science.” The planetary commons paper, for example, asserts that we have already passed six of nine “tipping points,” putting us THIS CLOSE to catastrophe. That sounds dire, to be sure. But just what determines a tipping point, and how do we know we’re past it? One of the references cited in support of this claim is a paper (with many of the same authors as the planetary commons paper) which defines the “safe operating space” for the nine variables.

What determines the limits of the “safe operating space”?
Why, it’s the presumed conditions prior to the Anthropocene!

The circle is thereby closed: the politically-defined Anthropocene is used to set the politically defined “safe operating space” for the Earth, which sets the course for “navigating” through the perilous Anthropocene. Follow the science! The agenda is clear: reverse the Industrial Revolution and return civilization to the illusory halcyon of the Holocene. This is the climate change echo chamber at work: a collection of mutually-reinforcing arbitrary presumptions dressed up in a science-y costume.

It would be amusing were it not for the costume being flashy enough to take in the mid-wit rubes that constitute our present-day ruling class. Danger lurks there, which was expressed eloquently 264 years ago by Adam Smith in his 1759 Theory of Moral Sentiments:

“The man of system, on the contrary, is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamored with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it… He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might choose to impress upon it. If those two principles coincide and act in the same direction, the game of human society will go on easily and harmoniously, and is very likely to be happy and successful. If they are opposite or different, the game will go on miserably, and the society must be at all times in the highest degree of disorder.

Garrett Hardin was, in his time, also a “man of system,” and it’s worth remembering that our last flirtation with the tragedy of the commons did not end well, especially not for Garrett Hardin himself, who now seems to be somewhat of an embarrassment to our present-day presumptive “persons of system.” We seem to have learned nothing since 1968, or for that matter, since 1759.

Will history repeat, this time as farce? Or will it be tragedy?

See Also 

Don’t Buy “Planetary Boundaries” Hype

Warning: Earth Day Became Polluted

Clearly climatists are worried about current cold weather, ironically triggered by the beginning of COP28 coinciding with heavv snow closing airports in Munich, for example. Add to that Buffalo Bills NFL playoff game postponed due to extreme cold. So Climate Central coordinated a PR campaign lest the believers lose faith in Global Warming.  Later below are noted the three themes that appear.

Why we still have brutal cold snaps even as the planet warms to record levels, CNN

Why extreme cold weather events still happen in a warming world, PBS

Extreme cold in a warming world: Climate instability may be disrupting polar vortex, UPI

Extreme cold and climate change: What’s the deal?  CBC explains.

What is climate? And how is it different from weather? Deutsche Welle (DW)

Why is it so cold in the UK right now – and how long will Arctic chill last? The Guardian

Extreme cold still happens in a warming world – in fact climate instability may be disrupting the polar vortex, Yahoo News

1.  Cold is Weather, Not Climate

Some of the reassurances are the familiar refrain that cold is weather, while warming is forever.

2.  CO2 Causes Extreme Weather of All Kinds

Others claim that rising CO2 causes all kinds of extreme weather, including big chills.  Actually, those stories are way out on a limb, contrary to what IPCC itself says.  Roger Pielke Jr. explains at his substack page What the IPCC Actually Says About Extreme Weather.  I promise, you’ll be utterly shocked. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Back to extreme weather — let’s take a look what IPCC AR6 says about the time of emergence for various extreme events. Here are some direct quotes related to specific phenomena:

• • An increase in heat extremes has emerged or will emerge in the coming three decades in most land regions (high confidence)
  • There is low confidence in the emergence of heavy precipitation and pluvial and river flood frequency in observations, despite trends that have been found in a few regions
  • There is low confidence in the emergence of drought frequency in observations, for any type of drought, in all regions.
  • Observed mean surface wind speed trends are present in many areas, but the emergence of these trends from the interannual natural variability and their attribution to human-induced climate change remains of low confidence due to various factors such as changes in the type and exposure of recording instruments, and their relation to climate change is not established. . . The same limitation also holds for wind extremes (severe storms, tropical cyclones, sand and dust storms).

The IPCC helpfully provides a summary table for a range of extremes, indicating for various phenomena whether emergence has been achieved with medium or high confidence at three points in time:

to date (today), i.e., specifically when IPCC AR6 was completed in 2021,
by 2050 under RCP8.5/SSP5-8.5, and
by 2100 under RCP8.5/SSP5-8.5.

Those three dates are displayed as the 3 right-most column in the table below.

A white entry in the table means that emergence has not yet been or is not in the future expected to be achieved. The blue and orange entries represent the emergence of respectively increasing and decreasing signals at various levels of confidence.

Take a moment and look at the table carefully. Look especially at all those white cells.

Clearly, with the exception perhaps of only extreme heat,
the IPCC is badly out of step with today’s apocalyptic zeitgeist.

Maybe that is why no one mentions what the IPCC actually says on extreme events. It may also help to explain why a recent paper that arrives at conclusions perfectly consistent with the IPCC is now being retracted with no claims of error or misconduct.

3.  CO2 Makes the Polar Vortex Unstable

The wavy polar vortex is a real phenomenon, but blaming it on us driving our SUVs is a stretch too far.  A previous post deconstructs this warmist claim.

No, CO2 Doesn’t Drive the Polar Vortex (Updated)

 

The graph shows the rapid deterioration of Argentines’ wellbeing in the last decade, and why they turned to Milei for a new path.  Only Venezuela’s hard left socialist regime was more destructive than the Peronists governing Argentina.  Many doubted that Milei would follow through on his promises, no different than other politicians.  Boy are they mistaken, and also scared that libertarian economics will takeover elsewhere and dismantle governmental bureaucracies.  The latest report is from Monica Showalter at American Thinker Argentina’s Milei proves to be the world’s strangest ‘dictator,’ handing out freedom all over the place.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

According to Breitbart News:

Argentine President Javier Milei announced during a national broadcast on Wednesday night the signing of a Necessity and Urgency Decree (DNU), a form of executive order, that would modify or overturn an estimated 350 federal economic policies.

Milei’s executive order targeted nearly every aspect of the Argentine economy – including imports, price controls, health care, sports federations, landlord and tenant policies, and the yerba mate industry – in what he described as an attempt to impose a “shock stabilization plan” to prevent a financial catastrophe. Argentina is facing the worst economic crisis of its history as a result of decades of socialist policies, lavish government spending, and corruption, fueling skyrocketing rates of poverty, joblessness, and inflation. The nation’s inflation rate reached 160 percent in the days after Milei’s December 10 inauguration.

And yeah, it’s a lot of stuff:

Milei eliminated multiple laws that allow the state to control the prices of various goods and services. The “Rental Law,” which greatly limited what kind of lease contracts landlords and tenants can sign, no longer exists. The Argentine outlet Infobae noted that rents in Argentina increased by 300 percent year-on-year in 2023 under the Rental Law, despite socialist lawmakers insisting it would keep rents low.

The executive order also eliminated price control laws for artisanal products, regulations governing the purchasing of rural land, and the federal government’s Price Observatory, “to avoid the persecution of companies.” Customs regulations controlling imports and exports were also severely reduced and a national registry of importers and exporters will cease to exist, as the DNU noted Argentina was one of the few countries in the world to have such a registry. Milei’s executive order addressed Internet access, as well, greatly deregulating telecommunications.

The regulations targeted some of Argentina’s largest industries, including winemaking – freed from a restrictive state regulation system – and the cultivation of yerba mate, a plant used to make a hot herbal drink popular in Argentina. The order called for the modernization of the National Institute of Yerba Mate to limit the use of quality control regulations to suppress the industry. It made similar revisions to policies for mining, the airline industry, and sugar. On the subject of health care, the executive order dramatically deregulates the drug industry, allowing Argentines greater access to generic drugs and expanding the use of electronic prescriptions “to achieve greater agility in the industry and minimize costs.”

Food prices have reportedly dropped 15% overnight.

And what does the left call him after doling out all this freedom, freedom, freedom?

They have a mighty funny understanding of what a dictator is. Apparently if you free your country and deregulate everything that made it a living hell, you are a dictator to the left. The real dictators, of course, like Fidel Castro or whoever the heck has succeeded him, always get pilgrimages, always get passes.

But Milei slashes regulation to allow the private sector to finally breathe and blossom, well, he’s the dictator.

Obviously, the left has a thing against freedom. The more it’s handed out, the more upset it gets.  Sound like anyone north of Argentina that you might have heard of?  We learn a lot about the left here in the states just by watching how they react in Argentina.

And we can only conclude that if this is a dictator, let’s have more of them.

Postscript

The precipitous drop in living standards and the monster rise in poverty tells us the story of what socialism does and why Argentinians elected wildly radical libertarian Milei.

And if we look to the United States, the story is comparable and in some ways even more alarming: Under Joe Biden’s socialism, U.S. poverty has risen 5 percentage points from 7.4% to 12.4% over a mere one year’s time, not ten years, according to a report in Time magazine.

The U.S. poverty rate saw its largest one-year increase in history. 12.4% of Americans now live in poverty according to new 2022 data from the U.S. census, an increase from 7.4% in 2021. Child poverty also more than doubled last year to 12.4% from 5.2% the year before.

The U.S. poverty level is now $13,590 for individuals and $23,030 for a family of three. The new data shows that 37.9 million people lived in poverty in 2022.

That story is the same everywhere on what socialism does and why people take chances on change. The correlation is so close it needs to become better known: Vote for a socialist, find poverty as a result. Happens every time. (Source: Chart shows why Argentinians voted for Milei.)

Background Post: 

Why Milei is Argentina’s Last, Best Hope

 

The media is replete with announcements of a “breakthrough” agreement at COP28 to make “operational” a fund through which “developed” countries compensate “developing” countries for “loss and damage” from “climate change.”  The six terms in quotations highlight the ambiguity depending on how those words are defined.  Let’s start with “breakthrough “, “operational” and “developed” vs. “developing” countries.

From Nature: First cash pledged for countries devastated by climate change: COP28 starts with historic decision. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Draft resolution on a ‘loss and damage fund’ has attracted more than
$400 million, but climate-vulnerable countries say more cash is needed.

Researchers and campaigners welcomed the move, while recognizing that much more is needed and that pledges are not the same as money in the bank.  “It remains to be seen how much money rich countries, developed countries and the polluting countries will be willing to put into that fund,” says Romain Weikmans, a climate-finance researcher at Université Libre de Bruxelles in Brussels.

Countries calling for the fund, especially those highly vulnerable to climate change, are expecting it to eventually reach at least $100 billion per year. Tom Mitchell, executive director of the International Institute for Environment and Development, an environmental-research think tank in London, says the total amounts so far “are really, really very modest”. Some of the least developed countries see the US commitment as “a slap in the face”, he adds.

Further details, such as how much of the money will be given out as grants versus loans and who will be eligible to receive funding have not been announced. [China, India?]

RTE adds: Questions Remain

There’s still a lot that needs clarifying about this fund. Some of the big outstanding questions include the fund’s size, its relationship to other funds, how it will be administered over the long term, and what its funding priorities will be.

In response to the announcement, leading African think-tank representative Mohamad Adhow noted there were “no hard deadlines, no targets, and countries are not obligated to pay into it, despite the whole point being for rich, high-polluting nations to support vulnerable communities who have suffered from climate impacts”.

Many Issues with Climate “Loss and Damage”

Roger Pielke Jr. explains the other problems with this initiative in a recent talk at the Canadian Global Affairs Institute Climate Change, Disasters, and the Rightful Place of Science  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

“One thing I’d like to make clear is that climate change is real. It’s serious, and it deserves urgent attention to both mitigation and adaptation,” Pielke said. “But I’ve come to see, across my career, that the importance of climate change is held up by many people as a reason for why we can abandon scientific integrity. This talk is about climate and scientific integrity, how we maintain it, and how we use it in decision-making. Reasonable people can disagree about policies and different directions that we want to go, but none of us are going to benefit if we can’t take expertise and bring it to decision-making to ground policymaking in the best available knowledge. Overall, climate science and policy have a narrative problem.”

Hurricanes

In addressing the narrative problem, concerning the first area of public discourse- hurricanes, Pielke displayed a graph of official data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. It displayed landfalling hurricanes in the U.S. and showed a long-term trend of no increase in hurricanes overall – despite environmental websites claiming the opposite. Pielke noted the reason for misreporting is the fact that there were no major hurricanes to hit the United States between 2005 to 2017, a pause reflected in the data chart which had a gap there from 2005 to 2017. So if you recently became climate aware in the last 20 years, which many in the media have, you would think that hurricanes were increasing.

“That’s why we do science – because our lived experience is not a good substitute for looking at data and evidence,” Pielke said. “So if you’re paying attention to the news, just this week, it was all over the news that the proportion of hurricanes that have become major hurricanes has increased. Well, not according to the science. So, one of the challenges that I try to emphasize is that there is good information out there.

If the media ignores it and in the political debates it’s ignored,
then it’s all of our responsibility to ferret out what’s real.”

Disasters

In addressing his second subject, disasters, Pielke differentiated disasters from extreme weather defining a disaster as an extreme weather event that intersects with an exposed and vulnerable society.

He quoted from an October 21, 2023 Financial Times article that at a private event last month, one executive at Lloyd’s of London that oversees the market told underwriters that they had not yet seen clear evidence that a warming climate is a major driver in loss claims. Pielke attended the event in person and perceived a concern in the room that anyone making that statement publicly would be called a climate denier, leading to a suppression or minimization of the statement.

Pielke also addressed UN Secretary-General António Guterres’ claim that the number of weather, climate and water-related disasters has increased by a factor of five over the past 50 years. He noted that Guterres used data from the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) to make this claim. Pielke referred to notes in CRED reports that have advised for decades “Don’t look at our data and use it to say anything about the weather” and advises their data shows the evolution of registration of natural disaster events over time, which has increased with better means of communication.

As well, since there is more international aid for disaster affected
communities, more communities are reporting.

On the subject of U.S. disasters, in his sixteen years of affiliation with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Pielke observed a reporting phenomenon – an addiction to reporting billion-dollar weather disasters. The reports are used by advocacy groups, and then the media, who publicize that climate change is causing more billion-dollar weather disasters, something Pielke says isn’t supported by science. He points out that as the United States has gotten wealthier, the actual proportion of that wealth that is damaged in disasters has gone down dramatically.

Misinterpreting Climate Scenarios

Pielke then addressed his third subject, climate scenarios and the effect of misinterpretation.

He referred to the Special Report on Emissions Scenarios (SRES) – a report by the IPCC that was published in 2000. The 1,184 greenhouse gas emissions scenarios described in the Report have been used to make projections of possible future climate change. Pielke noted that the area of discussion of climate scenarios “is so full of jargon and technical details, that it is almost impenetrable”. Since 1,184 scenarios weren’t easy to study, the community decided to simply to study the four you see represented by the four bold blue lines on the first graph below- namely RCP8.5, RCP 6.0, RCP4.5 and RCP2.6.

(RCP 4.5 is described by the IPCC as a moderate scenario in which emissions peak around 2040 and then decline. RCP 8.5 is the highest baseline emissions scenario in which emissions continue to rise throughout the twenty-first century. Climate change projected under RCP 8.5 will typically be more severe. RCP 2.6 at the bottom is what today we would call the Paris Accord target)

Pielke pointed out that the assumption underlying all the SRES scenarios is that the world is going to turn to coal as the dominant energy source in the 21st century. For this to happen, Pielke calculates that over 3000 new coal plants would have to be built by the year 2100, which he says won’t happen and the IEA expectation is in agreement. However, the Canadian government, the U.S. government, and the Indian government, all rely on the RCP 8.5 scenario and it is pervasive in global climate policy as the IPCC remains focused on it. Pielke points out that all the SRES scenarios have assumptions about GDP, the carbon intensity of energy, and more that are already out of date. Pielke also pointed out that the scientific community has increasingly relied on RCP 8.5 – the most extreme scenario and in 2023, the RCP 8.5 remains the most used scenario in research with many studies published each day using it.

“So why is that?” Pielke said. “The reason is, if you do a study with RCP 8.5 with massive amounts of emissions to 2100, you’re going to get big effects. You can publish that in a prominent journal. Your university will put out a press release on it. You might even get into the New York Times because these very extreme scenarios are notable. Scientists agree there are legitimate reasons for using extreme scenarios in research. Usually, it’s what we call exploratory research, not projective research. Scientists tell me ‘Well if we want to separate the signal of forced climate change from the noise of internal climate variability, we need these strong scenarios’.”

Pielke referred to this attitude as “noble cause corruption”- the idea that
less rigorous science and even bad science is excusable if it advances a cause.

A revision of the scenario projections was initiated in June 2023 and the process of generating the next generation of scenarios has begun and Pielke reports they have removed the top RCP8.5 and RCP 6.0 scenarios. However, he says because we are currently using scenarios developed in the early 2000s, leading media and advocacy narratives which use them extensively are problematic “because a lot of bad science has gotten mixed in with the good science and it’s really hard to tell the difference.”

Background Loss and Damage Post

Climate Loss and Damage Fails Again

 

Finally, an intelligent explanation of why Argentines chose Milei as their champion.  G. Patrick Lynch cuts through the smoke and mirrors in his Law and Liberty article Misunderstanding Milei.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

It took almost 80 years. That’s how long Argentina’s economy and society have been in free fall. In some ways, it’s a testament to our greatest fears about democracy and self-government that no political leader had the political incentives and simple nerve to buck the status quo. Eighty years of relentless, grinding inflation and spiraling deficits, followed by defaults, currency devaluations, and restarts before November 19. But finally, the people of Argentina have rejected a failed status quo. Javier Milei publicly won a near landslide by Argentinian standards, and when one considers the probability of Peronist cheating at approximately 100%, the margin was likely much higher. Whether or not the alternative Argentinians have chosen will “fix the situation” is for now beside the point.

They have exercised the one option they have—rejecting the incumbents
for the promise of something different. That’s all that democracy promises.

Javier MIlei, who today is being called “far right,” “radical,” and (by the very lazy) a “far-right libertarian,” is now the president-elect of one of the greatest failed states of our lifetimes. It’s hard to fully explain how badly governed Argentina has been by its long line of Peronist governments distinguished for their lavish spending, stunning corruption, autocratic tendencies, and economic nationalism. The economic statistics are mind-boggling. Defaults, regular annual inflation rates in excess of 100%, a resulting enormous welfare state, parasitic public sector unions, and largely complicit “centrist” politicians: all these are now the depressing landscape of the Argentine political economy.

However, if one did not live this reality but were to simply draw conclusions about the election and Milei from the international (particularly American) press, one might think Argentina had fallen into a state of collective delusion, choosing an insane, sideburn-covered Latin American version of Trump without any reason other than some vague references to inflation and debt payments. As the saying goes, the international press has buried the lede.

Milei is trying to address the disastrous situation in Argentina, but outlets such as Reuters described it as “shock therapy” in a not-so-subtle reference to Naomi Klein’s book Shock Doctrine. Klein argues that nature or war can create disasters and give opportunities for “capitalism,” (anthropomorphized through Milton Friedman) to engage in exploitation by establishing extremist policies like private property rights and markets. In this case, however, it’s the legacy of the exact policies that Klein and her ilk support that has created the unmitigated disaster.

Money printing, a bloated welfare state, an emphasis on economic “independence”
and other prominent leftwing economic prescriptions have made this disaster,
but the irony is lost on the folks at Reuters.

Milei’s main, nay fundamental, policy proposals are all in the context of this backdrop. His firm commitment to abolishing Argentine central banking and cutting social spending is straight out of Ludwig von Mises and Milton Friedman, and it is completely appropriate given the circumstances. The only way that an “anarcho-capitalist” could be elected was in a situation of failed governance and welfare statism so dire that he could crack the door open slightly and introduce ideas unknown by the mainstream intelligentsia, let alone the average Argentine on the street.

The language used by the international media, the gigantic “blob” of interests in the World Bank and international aid community, and the mainstream economists who oppose him is designed to delegitimize Milei. They don’t want another success story like Chile in the region. Two nations that adopt “neoliberal” policies that work mean their jobs and narratives are at risk. They are and should be terrified.

The problem is their terms are like insults thrown around in a schoolyard. They are neither coherent nor consistent. Consider the three most prominent politicians to be given the “far right” treatment by the mainstream press, El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, and now Milei. What do they have in common? Substantively the answer is very little. Bukele is engaged in a crackdown on gangs and crime that involves widespread violations of due process and civil rights, but has led to a plummeting of crime rates. Meloni is known as an anti-immigrant crusader, but she also supports the Ukraine war and like Bukele has sky-high approval ratings. Milei wants to abolish central banking, and while he’s pro-life, he’s also a bachelor who brags about his sex life and argues for open markets and trade with the United States of all places. Yet to a journalist in the legacy media, they are all part of what has become known as the “far right.” Not satisfied that describing politicians as “conservative” or “right” is enough to scare their readers, the network news, national newspapers, and news services have decided to add a qualifier to the term. 

The growth in the use of the term “far right” is yet another example
how intellectual honesty, philosophical consistency, and respect
for liberal discourse are completely absent from our public debates.

But when we see the media force these politicians into a two-dimensional straightjacket, it doesn’t just present a problem of categories. It’s also about the limits of elite background and education. As David Brooks’ recent New York Times column rightly noted, the national news media are very much alike in background and education. The educational institutions that produced these figures support consensus views and expert policy creation, which accord with their own preferences. Briefly, that means government solutions to government problems. Those solutions involve hiring policy people to “fix” things. But what about when the consensus is wrong? What if the theory doesn’t fit the reality? What happens when crime runs rampant in El Salvador despite the best intentions of Western policymakers? What happens when Argentina’s central bank drives inflation to unimaginable levels at immense social cost? Unconventional answers emerge and democracy gives it energy.

The press and policy elites cannot address who Milei is or what he’s proposing on the merits because it does not fit their world view. Hyperinflation is not caused by climate change, racism, or opposition to gender displacement. It is not a social construct or a random event, particularly when it happens continuously for almost 80 years and destroys a largely upper-middle-class society. It is the political and economic failure that results from political exploitation and central planning. The Argentine bureaucracy and the chattering classes have failed citizens for decades. We know the cause, and so does Milei. His opponents wanted to make things a little less bad, possibly for a few years until they once again made things much worse.

Peronism is the abusive relationship, the addiction, the concept
that no responsibility is necessary after years of irresponsibility.
Milei is the medicine, and he will not be an easy pill to swallow.

The possibility of Galt’s Gulch in Argentina is basically zero. He faces nearly intractable political challenges in achieving even a small percentage of his legislative agenda. And yet if he can achieve one goal he might allow Argentina to start down a different path. Dollarizing the economy might force the state into fiscal responsibility and end the monetary insanity that currently reigns. It will be painful, but perhaps not as painful as decades more of the numbing effect of more stimulus that ultimately debases the currency.

There are no easy solutions here, which is part of the reason the media
and its stale-minded intellectual influences have no solutions to offer.

They are left with nothing but vague language, scare tactics, and labeling. What took 80 years to destroy will take decades, perhaps centuries to recreate. Well before he won the first round of voting back in September, Milei was asked what his model for Argentina was. He replied, Ireland. Ireland of course famously cut taxes and regulation, freeing its economy and spurring rapid economic growth.

Argentina could do worse than Ireland, but anything
different than its current path will be an improvement.

 

From the Advanced Science Research Center, GC/CUNY Earth Has Too Much Nitrogen – and Too Little Nitrogen – at the Same Time.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds

Multi-institutional research team finds declining
nitrogen availability in a nitrogen-rich world.

Since the mid-20th century, research and discussion have focused on the negative effects of excess nitrogen on terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. However, new evidence indicates that the world is now experiencing a dual trajectory in nitrogen availability. Following years of attention to surplus nitrogen in the environment, our evolving understanding has led to new concerns about nitrogen insufficiency in areas of the world that do not receive significant inputs of nitrogen from human activities. In a new review paper, “Evidence, Causes, and Consequences of Declining Nitrogen Availability in Terrestrial Ecosystems,” in the journal Science, a multi-institutional team of researchers describes the causes of declining nitrogen availability and how it affects ecosystem function.

Over the last century, humans have more than doubled the global supply of reactive nitrogen through industrial and agricultural activities. This nitrogen becomes concentrated in streams, inland lakes, and coastal bodies of water, sometimes resulting in eutrophication, low-oxygen dead zones, and harmful algal blooms. These negative impacts of excess nitrogen have led scientists to study nitrogen as a pollutant. However, rising carbon dioxide and other global changes have increased demand for nitrogen by plants and microbes, and the research team’s newly published paper demonstrates that nitrogen availability is declining in many regions of the world, with important consequences for plant growth.

[Note the Nitrogen Deposition graph in the top diagram. It peaked in the 1980s, yet in 2023 it is being used to force farmers off their land in the Netherlands,Canada, Ireland and other nations to come]

Nitrogen is an essential element for plants and the animals that eat them. Gardens, forests, and fisheries are all more productive when they are fertilized with nitrogen. If plant nitrogen becomes less available, trees grow more slowly and their leaves are less nutritious to insects, potentially reducing growth and reproduction, not only of insects, but also the birds and bats that feed on them.

“When nitrogen is less available, every living thing holds on to the element for longer, slowing the flow of nitrogen from one organism to another through the food chain. This is why we can say that the nitrogen cycle is seizing up,” said Andrew Elmore, senior author on the paper, and a professor of landscape ecology at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science and at the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center.

On top of increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide, rising global temperatures also affect plant and microbial processes associated with nitrogen supply and demand. Warming often improves conditions for growth, which can result in longer growing seasons, leading plant nitrogen demand to exceed the supply available in soils. Disturbances, including wildfires, can also remove nitrogen from systems and reduce availability over time.

Our evolving understanding of the Earth system has led to new concerns about N insufficiency after years of attention to surplus N in the environment. An integrated suite of responses will be needed to simultaneously manage both of these problems. Given the potential implications of declining N availability for food webs, carbon sequestration, and other ecosystem functions and services, it is important that research, management, and policy actions be taken before the consequences of declining N availability become more severe. It can be difficult to create a shared understanding of the N cycle and the many effects of N on ecosystem health and human well-being. The combination of excess N and declining N availability, in which outcomes vary widely across landscapes, adds to this challenge. Developing dialogues among diverse stakeholders—scientists, ecosystem managers, and others—will be necessary for alleviating and adapting to declining N availability in an N-rich world.

 

A war against farmers has emerged, threatening to push them off the land they’ve farmed for generations. As small and mid-sized farms close their doors, governments and corporate entities can scoop up the land.  Those in control of the land control the food supply and, along with it, the people.

In Canada,  Trudeau’s Liberals have announced a goal of a 50 percent reduction in emissions from fertilizer, a major producer of nitrous oxide, over the next seven years.

“Fertilizer Canada slammed the government’s short-sighted approach, arguing that reducing nitrogen fertilizer use “will have considerable impact on Canadian farmers’ incomes and reduce overall Canadian exports and GDP.”

They may as well slam their heads against a barn door. When it comes to Canada’s re-invention as a socialist state, nothing will knock the communist ship off its course.

“A report compiled by Meyers Norris Penny suggests that regulated fertilizer reduction could cost Canadian farmers $48 billion by 2030 and reduce crop sizes.”

Justin Trudeau has waged war against his own country since the day he became PM in 2015. This man doesn’t like our country very much, and in particular, maintains an innate hatred toward working class Canadians. Perhaps it’s because he has never been one. Then again, it could be part of a larger plot unfolding within society.

It was destined to roll around eventually: an attack on Canadian farmers under that gloriously green, climate emergency banner. This recent Trudeau move involves limiting the usage of fertilizer — a substance, when delivered in its most smelly, natural form, reminds us of what the federal Liberals have long shoveled upon Alberta.

Cutting the bull and arriving at the meat, so to speak: the government intends to effectively reduce farmers’ use of fertilizer by 50 per cent — in scientific terms by limiting the use of the key ingredient nitrous oxide — as part of its bid to severely reduce carbon emissions and thereby fight accelerating climate change.

Farmers, instead, want any fertilizer reductions measured by how much food is produced compared to the amount of fertilizer used, something western growers are striving for already, as growing more for less saves them money in addition to curbing emissions.

Now, when there’s a global food emergency looming due to the ongoing war in Ukraine, such a practical step would seem eminently sensible. But no, Trudeau is demanding an absolute reduction in usage, which will naturally result in less food being produced.

Contributing to global starvation has now become
part of current Canadian public policy.

This latest stupidity was undoubtedly spawned when our prime minister — always looking to one-up any country competing in the green-morality sweepstakes — learned the Dutch government intended such a move.

In the Netherlands that immediately resulted in mass protests by furious farmers, who closed highways with tractors, brought cows to the capital, threatening to slaughter them on parliamentary steps, while blocking vital food distribution centres.

Is the Nitrogen Crisis Real?

“In 2021, the European Union’s Natura 2000 network released a map of areas in the Netherlands that are now protected against nitrogen emissions. Any Dutch farmer who operates their farm within 5 kilometers of a Natura 2000 protected area would now need to severely curtail their nitrogen output, which in turn would limit their production”

Dutch dairy farmer Nynke Koopmans with the Forum for Democracy believes the nitrogen problem is made up. “It’s one big lie,” she says. “The nitrogen has nothing to do with environmental. It’s just getting rid of farmers.” Another farmer said if new nitrogen rules go into effect, he’d have to reduce his herd of 58 milking cows down to six.

Nitrogen scientist Jaap C. Hanekamp was working for a government committee to study nitrogen, tasked with analyzing the government’s nitrogen model. He told Balmakov:8

“The whole policy is based on the deposition model about how to deal with nitrogen emissions on nature areas. And I looked at the validation studies and show that the model is actually crap. It doesn’t work. And doesn’t matter. They still continue using it, which is, in a sense, unsettling. I mean, really, can we do such a thing in terms of policy? Use a model which doesn’t work? It’s never about innovation, it’s always about getting rid of farmers.”

Nitrous Oxide and Climate

Paper  by C. A. de Lange, J. D. Ferguson, W. Happer, and W. A. van Wijngaarden.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Higher concentrations of atmospheric nitrous oxide (N2O) are expected to slightly warm Earth’s surface because of increases in radiative forcing. Radiative forcing is the difference in the net upward thermal radiation flux from the Earth through a transparent atmosphere and radiation through an otherwise identical atmosphere with greenhouse gases. Radiative forcing, normally measured in Wm−2, depends on latitude, longitude and altitude, but it is often quoted for the tropopause, about 11 km of altitude for temperate latitudes, or for the top of the atmosphere at around 90 km.

For current concentrations of greenhouse gases, the radiative forcing per added N2O molecule is about 230 times larger than the forcing per added carbon dioxide (CO2) molecule. This is due to the heavy saturation of the absorption band of the relatively abundant greenhouse gas, CO2, compared to the much smaller saturation of the absorption bands of the trace greenhouse gas N2O.

But the rate of increase of CO2 molecules, about 2.5 ppm/year (ppm = part per million by mole), is about 3000 times larger than increase of N2O molecules, which has held steady at around 0.00085 ppm/year since the year 1985. So, the contribution of nitrous oxide to the annual increase in forcing is 230/3000 or about 1/13 that of CO2. If the main greenhouse gases, CO2, CH4 and N2O have contributed about 0.1 C/decade of the warming observed over the past few decades, this would correspond to about 0.00064 K per year or 0.064 K per century of warming from N2O.

Proposals to place harsh restrictions on nitrous oxide emissions
because of warming fears are not justified by these facts.
Restrictions would cause serious harm;
for example, by jeopardizing world food supplies.

Resource: Flawed Science Behind Nitrogen “Crisis” (Briggs and Hanekamp)

Footnote:  The “nitrogen war” in Netherlands, an anticipation of times to come

It all looks as the “nitrogen war” in the Netherlands is an anticipation of the conflict between environment awareness organizations and agriculture, industry over production systems and its consequences.

“I really understand their anger,” Marcel Crok, a Dutch science writer and co-founder of the Climate Intelligence Foundation, said in an interview. “The farmers are also angry because they say, ‘we are the only sector who get all the blame.’ What about industry? What about the traffic? Maybe we should just ban all the cars in the Netherlands because they also emit nitrogen.”

“This plan as announced in practice means that, in certain areas, farmers have to reduce their nitrogen emissions by 70%,” he continued. “That means they simply have to quit.”

The proposal to sharply cut nitrogen emissions is tied to a 2019 Dutch court decision forcing the nation’s government to take more aggressive measures to curb nitrogen emissions. The Netherlands, though, has heavily regulated agriculture emissions since the 1990s and farmers have largely complied with such rules, Crok said.

Netherlands emits a large quantity of nitrogen because of its massive agriculture industry which accounts for about 87% of the country’s 124 million kilograms of annual ammonia emissions, a US Department of Agriculture report showed. The nation exported US$26.8 billion worth of food products despite having a relatively tiny population compared to other major producers, according to World Bank data.

“It is not very rational to curb the Dutch agriculture if you realize that they have the highest production per acre in the world and therefore the environmental load per kilogram food is lower than elsewhere,” Simon Rozendaal, a Dutch journalist and chemists said. “So, in a sense Dutch agriculture is a benefit for climate as well as biodiversity.”

“This will definitely affect ordinary civilians and is part of a global agenda, so everyone around the world, especially Western countries, should be aware that this is something that is not just about the Dutch government. This is part of the ‘2030 agenda,’ this is part of the ‘great reset.’

”Similar protests could soon happen in the U.K. and parts of the European Union where natural gas and energy costs are near historic levels, according to Benny Peiser, the director of the London-based Global Warming Policy Foundation. In the U.K., increased prices are expected to send 24% of households, or about 6.5 million households, into fuel poverty.

“The issue is that despite this growing energy crisis in Europe, some governments still prioritize the climate agenda which makes energy ever more expensive, or which forces farmers to close their farms because that is the top priority, still, for a number of governments,” Peiser argued. “This whole green agenda is causing huge burdens.”

“The Dutch are driven mad by these policies because it’s killing their businesses and the farmers are fighting back big time,” he said. “This is what’s going to happen all over Europe. I have no doubt that, come winter and millions of families can’t heat their homes or pay their bills anymore, that there will be unrest all over Europe.”

Joe Fried makes the case in his American Thinker article Pennsylvania’s 2020 Election Was Invalid — Says Who? Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

A while back I wrote these words: “The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania certified its 2020 election despite the undisputed fact that it had recorded 202,000 more ballots cast than voters.”

Recently, that statement was challenged by someone who made this comment: “Says who?” The comment is snarky but fair. My declaration warrants an in-depth explanation, so here it is.

The Analysis

Pennsylvania has a unique voter registration system, called SURE. Like every other voter registration system, the SURE system comprises all legally registered voters in the state. However, it also includes a subcategory of registered voters: the ones who actually voted in the last election (in this case, the 2020 election).

Because of that special subcategory (registered voters who actually voted), it is possible to compare the total ballots cast in the 2020 election to the total voters who participated in that election. The numbers must match because there has to be a one-to-one relationship between voters and ballots.

If parity does not exist, something is wrong.

Verity Vote (V.V.) is a Pennsylvania data analysis firm headed by Heather Honey. For the 2020 election, V.V. prepared a careful and detailed comparison of voters who participated in the election vs. ballots cast. Here are the V.V. findings:

When PA certified its election on November 24, 2020, there were about 202,000 more ballots cast than identifiable voters. In other words, there was a large voter deficit.

In late January 2021, when the 67 PA counties finally posted all voter information into the SURE registration system, there was still a voter deficit — about 121,000.

Let’s examine Verity Vote’s analysis in greater detail. Starting in October 2020, during the early voting period, V.V. purchased weekly updates to the SURE registration system. Those were purchased from the PA Department of State. VV kept buying the updates every week until February 2021, and each weekly update revealed the cumulative number of registered voters at that point in time.

When PA certified its election (November 24, 2020), Verity Vote could see that there were 202,000 fewer voters than ballots. How? It had the exact number of voters based on its analysis of the SURE weekly updates. V.V. also knew the total number of ballots that were cast, based on the reported votes, adjusted by overvotes, undervotes, and write-in votes. (Take my word for it: that is the correct procedure.)

After being challenged by Republican legislators in late December 2020, the PA Department of State issued a terse communication that acknowledged a discrepancy but dismissed its importance. The Department implied that it was a mere timing matter that would be resolved when all 67 counties finally posted voter information into the SURE system. However, this was not the case.

When the last PA counties finally posted information into the SURE registration system (at the end of January 2021), V.V. determined that there remained a voter deficit of 121,000. Using my audit experience, I extensively tested the V.V. analysis, and I found it to be logical and completely accurate.

A voter deficit existed, and the election should not have been certified.

The exact amount is not entirely clear because, magically, 30,000 more voters materialized (without explanation) six months after the election. Yes, the number of voters had grown by the time PA issued its “2020 General Election Report” on May 14, 2021. That is the reason I reported a deficit of just 90,000 in my book, Debunked. Although I suspected that the 30,000 increase in voters was a “plug” entry, I generously assumed that it was some sort of legitimate error correction made by PA.

Either way, however, the voter deficit exceeded Biden’s winning margin.

The Law

Now let’s examine this problem from a legal vantage point, because it appears that laws were broken in Pennsylvania.

PA Code Section 3154 (b) indicates that a precinct or voting district cannot certify its results unless the relevant county investigates any significant excess of votes over voters. When PA certified its election, however, there was a statewide voter deficit of 202,000. Therefore, there had to be several precincts with voter deficits. That simple mathematical truth tells us that Section 3154 (b) was violated.

In addition, there is administrative guidance that was issued by the PA Department of State on September 11, 2020 (version 1.0). That guidance requires counties to scan voter information into the SURE registration system on a daily basis. Here are the specific instructions with regard to the counties, which process the mail-in votes:

County boards of elections should record the receipt of absentee and mail ballots daily in the SURE system. To record a ballot as returned, the staff should scan the correspondence ID barcode on the outside of the envelope.

The necessity of this process is obvious. If a ballot is cast on Monday, but the envelope is not scanned into the registration system until Tuesday, what happens if it turns out the voter is not really registered? All identifying information is on the envelope — not the ballot. For that reason, the ballot that was cast cannot be retrieved.

Incredibly, secretary of state Kathy Boockvar did not seem to grasp this basic fact. Instead, she saw certification as a simple counting procedure:

It is however the vote counts certified by the counties, not the uploading of voter histories into the SURE system, that determines the ultimate certification of an election[.]

No, Madam Secretary: The ultimate certification is determined by the vote count of legally registered voters. If you are unable to identify those legally registered voters — even three months after the election — something is very wrong, and probably illegal.

Those are the facts, and here is some theory. Perhaps this is what happened in the crooked state of Pennsylvania. Trump was leading by nearly 700,000 votes right after the November 3 election, and there was probably panic in Harrisburg, PA. The folks down there had to certify their election in just three weeks, and, my God! What would happen if Trump still had more votes than Biden on the day of certification?

For that reason, I believe that the people in Harrisburg cast all caution to the wind. They decided to jam the system with every ballot and validate the voter registrations later. However, when they finally tried to match voters to registration records, they could not do it. Why? Perhaps many of the voters were phony. Maybe these ballots were some of the 275,000 harvested ballots reported by True the Vote in the movie 2000 Mules.

But there is nothing to worry about because the PA Department of State is staffed by Democrats, in a Democrat state, within a country run by Democrats. Therefore, the FBI won’t be busting in doors, and nobody will be charged with fraud or malfeasance. In fact, hardly anyone will ever hear of this fraud. But you heard it here.

Joe Fried is an Ohio-based CPA who has performed and reviewed hundreds of certified financial audits. He is the author of the book Debunked? and a new book called How Elections Are Stolen. It outlines 23 problems that must be fixed before the 2024 elections. More information can be found at https://joefriedcpa.substack.com (Joe’s free Substack account).